But on the other hand “liquor before beer, you’re in the clear!”
Is there any truth to these bits of folk wisdom or is it all BS?
There is a grain of truth to it, but it has more to do with each person’s individual stomach, and how easily they are nauseated by different amounts of fluid and alcohol.
My sire’s version was:
Which seems to me to be just the opposite of the OP.
Huh. I always heard, “beer before whisky, mighty risky; whisky before beer, always good cheer”. But, when I was drinking, it was usually beer, whisky, beer, whisky, beer, whisky, so it’s all good.
Over here it’s
Wine on beer, feeling queer*.
Beer on wine, feeling fine.
If my experience on the last weekend before Christmas is anything to go by, this is quite true.
*In the old-skool sense of the word.
In my experience, not to be mistaken for The Truth, I always do better drinking the strongest booze first.
This is just because as the night goes on and I get more “animated” I tend to drink more quickly and also care less about tomorrow’s hangovers. So whatever is drunk last is drunk more quickly and with less sense. You know, it’s where you will drink anything and lots of it at three in the morning. So much the better if it was beer rather than 40% bottle of strange liquor you found in the back of the cupboard.
So I think it’s more psychological than to do with any chemical reaction or quirks in the digestions system.
I think it’s all psychological. The idea is that whatever you’re drinking first tends to set the rate for the rest of the night (especially as you get drunker…). So if you start off chugging beer, there’s a tendency to – if not chug, at least drink in larger quantities – when you move to whiskey or whatever. With obviously negative results.
On the other hand, if you start off sipping scotch, there’s likely to be a tendency to keep sipping when you turn to beer. Thus avoiding potential problems with unplanned overindulgence.
Plus what Pookah said.
Hoo-boy, you obviously weren’t around my circle of drinking buddies. None of us ever sipped a beer in our lives, and certainly not when the evening started with Doctor Dickel.
I always thought this had to do with the sugar. Mixed drinks and wine often have a lot of sugar, so a couple of these tend to blunt your appetite for more. Beer on the other hand doesn’t have a lot of sugar, so you can quickly get a bellyful of beer without being satisfied.
Put liquor on top of beer, and you get a full, foamy stomach potentially transferring alcohol into your bloodstream faster than you would want. But if you put liquor first, you naturally pace yourself in a direction that your body can handle.
As a clarifying afterthought, my above theory only works for liquor that is mixed in sugary drinks. For shots, scotch, or martinis, I think the risk is the same regardless of the drinking order.
I think it’s based on the speed of the drinking. If beer is your usual drink, you don’t sip, you quaff. So, when you get nicely toasted on beer and switch to whiskey drinks, you might keep quaffing. You’re going to get really blasted. It’s even worse if you start slugging down shots; that’s high-speed drinking.
So, if you’re accustomed to going home after a six-pack of beer, and one night you have four beers and eight shots of Cuervo Gold, naturally you’ll wake up feeling like you fell out of a tall tree and hit your head on every branch on the way down.
I don’t think the saying is meant to be literally true. It is just a reflection on wise drinking habits. The point is as you get drunk and your judgement becomes impaired, your best bet is to downshift to less potent drinks. Nights that involve upshifting tend to end “colorfully”.
Beer, being mostly water, has that built-in Stomach Filling property which forces a drinker to pace alcohol intake. Even if you slam beer and get sick, it is usually not that brutal. In fact, it is not that uncommon to get sick on beer and keep drinking. Alcohol, on the other hand, is an entirely different story.
I think the basis for the saying is that as the night wears on and you shift from buzzed to over-served, if you’re drinking beer you are probably ok. If you are pounding shots, then you are set up for an interesting morning.
The basic premise is that you can get much drunker much more quickly with mixed drinks than you can with beer. Beer tends to take up more volume as it is carbonated. In fact, when you are drinking a lot and often (like in college or if you spend every weekend at the Jersey Shore), it’s hard to quickly get a decent buzz off of just beer as it tends to have an embloatening effect. Best to down a couple of mixed drinks or shots first and then keep drinking beer throughout the night at a reasonible pace.
Supposedly, the carbonation from the beer makes you process the alcohol in the liquor faster. Don’t remember where I read it, but if there’s significant validity to it, then (a) drinking soda before liquor should do it too (to a lesser extent) and (b) it should really end in “never been drunker”.
FWIW, a lot of people talk about the sickly perils of mixing beer and liquor, mixing different kinds of liquors, mixing beer and liquor with wine, mixing alcohol with weed, etc. I’ve never had problems with any of those. I did a lot of drinking and a lot of getting-drunking and a lot of drugging one year, and I can only think of three times I’ve been sick from intoxication: one was when I downed an inhuman amount of whiskey without any other alcohol, and the other two were from a very short period of (smoked, not injected) heroin experimentation. (Once it started making me puke, I decided it wasn’t my bag. But that’s a story for another thread.)
Anyway, I did enough mixing of beer and liquor in my college dorm days and never got sick from it. I can’t remember if one way got me significantly drunker than another, though.
Personally, I start off every evening at the bar with a shot of Crown and a pint of Stella. This is followed by more beers, and maybe more shots later. Haven’t been sick yet.
I was trading ski shots of Jose Cuervo with bottles of Heineken the other night, and to be honest, i’ve never felt better 
It’s always held sort of true for me - not that liquor before beer will definitely make me puke, but it definitely ups the possibility. I thought it kind of had to do with all the fizziness in your stomach - not necessarily making you absorb alcohol faster, just making you feel a little too full/sloshy. I avoid white russians for the same reason (all that milk in your stomach… gross…).
It may actually be true according to this.
I always found that if I followed the advice of the MADD crowd and ate before I drank (the premise being that the food would soak up the alcohol so you wouldn’t get drunk so fast), I would be sick as a dog in the morning. If I drank on an empty stomach, I would be fine.
I rarely mixed beer and liquor, so I can’t really comment on the OP.
Everybody reacts to the various libations in different ways. Knowing your own limit and how quickly various drinks send you toward it is key. If you put any trust in a rhyme you heard somewhere (especially if you are an inexperienced drinker), that very trust could lead to you getting sick.
If you really want to know what works best for you, I suggest getting drunk on various combinations of drinks, and learning from experience. All in the name of personal enlightenment, of course 
.